


The Sum of Parts

by hyenateeth



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Overwatch, Demons, Devil Angela "Mercy" Ziegler, F/F, Soul Selling, ToT: Monster Mash, Trick or Treat: Chocolate Box, Trick or Treat: Trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-22 00:43:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12469688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyenateeth/pseuds/hyenateeth
Summary: Mercy has taken many souls in her days, but none as bright as Fareeha Amari's.





	The Sum of Parts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [echoslam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/echoslam/gifts).



> Fic for echoslammin for the Trick or Treat Exchange! I hope you like it, and I hope you have a happy halloween and a happy exchange!

She was human, once. It included all the messy things that came along with humanity – sweat, blood, illness, a beating heart.

She didn’t really miss any of those. It had been a long time since Angela Ziegler had been human.

* * *

It had started with science, not with magic. She had been a doctor, once. Dr. Ziegler, but her patients had called her an angel, befitting her name.

“Doctor, doctor, you are an angel,” they would say to her. “My guardian angel.”

And when they would call her that, she would beam, and humbly shake her head, and say, “No, I am no angel. I’m just a doctor.”

(Sometimes, people still thought she was an angel, but they were wrong.) 

She had championed so many breakthroughs, saved so many people – but it was never enough. She kept pushing forward – there were always more people to save. More to help. She won the Nobel Prize for her nanobiology, only 35 at the time, and she was famous. She had helped so many people.

Still, it was not enough. She felt a hunger inside, one that only grew and grew. She had thought, once, that it was a hunger to help people, to save them, but maybe she eventually pondered, that wasn’t it.

A hunger for knowledge, maybe. But that wasn’t quite right either.

 She kept pushing and pushing her limits, improving her nanobiology, experimenting. Experimenting on other, experimenting on herself.

At some point, it occurred to her, that maybe with her nanobiology, she could stop the process of aging entirely. Maybe, she could reverse the process of death itself.

And the closer she got to that, the more attention she drew from… something. 

Something old and great, something powerful.

Something she inadvertently summoned.

Something that made her an offer too good to refuse.

* * *

 

When she was a doctor, she would sometimes see people as the sum of their parts – the blood that pumped through their bodies, the oxygen in their lungs, dozens of organs that could all fail and be fixed, tissue, water, cells – all things she had to know how to fix.

Now, she could see humans from a distance, and see that there was so much she was blind to. She can see their lives, their souls – their hungers.

They all have hungers, just waiting to be exploited by her kind. In some humans it was just a glimmer, a spark, something to be coaxed out.

In others, it was like a burning flame, a bonfire inside them, that everyone around could see.

There had been others – some who summoned her, some she came to. What humans caught her eye varied – those who dabbled too deeply in magic, those who wanted more than what nature allowed for them, those whose souls burned too brightly for their own good. 

The ones that had been like her, mostly.

Then there had been the ones that summoned her. 

That was how she got her new name, when a foolish human, one who thought he could control her power, had summoned her the way foolish humans did, with bits of animal blood and bone, candles and chalk drawings on the floor.

“Mercy!” he had begged her, when she showed him her true form. “Please, have mercy!”

Mercy. She liked that.

* * *

 

Mercy watched humanity from the shadows, blending in among them, taking in their simple shallow lives, waiting for individuals to catch her eye.

A few had over the years – the ballet dancer who killed her husband, the yakuza heir almost killed by his brother, the jet pilot who nearly lost herself – but none had kept her interest for long. She struck bargains with them, collected their souls – and then left them. None held her interest. 

None till the soldier. None till Fareeha Amari.

This is what Mercy knew about Fareeha. 

She knew she valued justice, and charity, and hard work. She knew she had a mother that was lost to her – not dead, though that is what Fareeha had been told by the soldiers who showed up at her door that summer day. 

She knew she was a good soldier, smart and brave.

She knew she wanted more. More than any human should want. She knew her pulse quickened when she pictured the impossible, she knew her mind reeled when she looked into the sky. 

She knew that with a stretch of her wings, the ones she molded for herself from stolen bones and sinew, she could have her soul in her hands.

Watching, from the shadows, she stretched her wings and smiled. She has never taken a soul as bright, as wanting as Fareeha’s.

* * *

The first time she let appeared before Fareeha, she did it as a human. It was easy, to twist her appearance, make herself seem normal, seem human. To make it so when people looked at her, they barely noticed her at all. Except Fareeha.

She appeared in the busy streets of the city near Fareeha’s base, when she knew Fareeha was going to be there while off-duty, and there she was – in a white t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, acid washed jeans and hair loose – and Mercy could instantly feel the human’s eyes on her, drawn to her.

Good. 

When Fareeha stopped before her on the street she looked confused, lost.

“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry, I don’t know why I… Do I know you? I just saw you and I… I don’t know.”

Mercy smiled. Her smile was always the same, cool and calm, serene and angelic.

“Do you?”

“I… Who are you?”

Fareeha kept looking at her, like her eyes couldn’t focus. That was a trick her form could play on people – like they could never quite grasp what she looked like, could never quite focus on her features. Most humans, they would just forget it – fill in the blanks, assume she just looked “normal”. Fareeha though, she was trying to push past that, past her own limited human sight. How delightful.

So delightful, she decided to play a little game.

For a second, just for a second, Mercy let her glamour drop. For a second, she let Fareeha grasp her true form, and watched as her eyes widened, startled, horrified by the terror of her true form – but she did not recoil.

She stood still as stone, eyes fixed on Mercy, trying to parse what she had just seen, trying to believe if she had really seen it, as everyone else on the street passed around them, seeing nothing.

No one had ever reacted to her so little before. It was... startling, and nothing startled Mercy anymore. This mortal was full of surprises. 

“I will see you later, Fareeha,” said Mercy, smiling blithely and patted her cheek, disappearing the instant that Fareeha blinked.

* * *

 

The second time Mercy appeared before her it was in the middle of the night, when Fareeha couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop thinking about her encounter on the street, so she stepped outside her sleeping quarters for a breath of fresh air, only to find Mercy outside, waiting for her.

This time, Mercy had taken on a different form, one like how she has looked in life, a doctor, small, thin, pretty maybe. Unimposing – innocent looking. Regardless, she knew Fareeha would recognize her.

“It’s you,” she gasped. “You- What are you?” 

“Hello Fareeha,” Mercy said, in lieu of an answer. 

A normal human may have run, screamed, begged – but not Fareeha. Instead she settled, cautiously, looking Mercy up and down, as if trying to look for cracks in her appearance. When she found none, she spoke again. 

“You know my name.” 

“I do.” 

“And you aren’t human.”

 “I’m not.”

“… _what are you?”_

Again, Mercy reached out and stroked Fareeha’s face.

“I’m what you could be, for a price.”

Fareeha did not flinch, or even look surprised. She simply stared into Mercy’s eyes. 

“The price is… what I think it is?”

“Probably.”

“And what would I get from it? In return for your… price.”

Without speaking or letting her smile fall, she let her wings spread out behind her, manifesting as if made of light.

“I know what you want, Fareeha,” she said. “I know you want the sky.”

There were stars in Fareeha’s eyes. 

“Why me?” she asked. “Why did you come to me? Of all… of all the humans. Why me?”

“Oh Fareeha,” purred Mercy. “There are no other humans like you.”

She leaned in, and their lips met, but she was gone before Fareeha could kiss back.

* * *

 

The last time she comes before Fareeha, it was dawn, many days later. The soldier had climbed to the roof of her barracks, in a hidden spot where no one can see her, legs dangling off the roof, her eyes glued on the rising sun.

She did not turn to look at Mercy when she appeared behind her, in a third form this time, similar to her human form, but with her horns, her tail, her cloven feet, all peeking through.

“Have you thought about my offer?” she asked, voice as calm and lilting as ever.

“I have thought about you a great deal,” said Fareeha, still staring at the rising sun. “I would like to lie to myself and pretend you are an angel, but we both know that isn’t true.”

“Correct.”

“And if I were to… If I were to give you my soul, I would become like you? Not human.”

“ _More_ that human. So much more Fareeha.”

“Does everyone who… who loses their soul become like you?”

For a second, Mercy’s smile faultered.

“…No.” She answered eventually. “Most do not. I do not make this offer to most Fareeha. Most – they want earthy pleasures, a year of them, ten years, a hundred years… Then, my kind comes for them. But I am offering you so much more. I am offering you an _eternity_ , Fareeha.”

“And how can I trust you. You… you’re a demon.”

 Mercy almost chuckled at it being laid out so plainly.

“You can’t. But you do, don’t you?”

Finally, Fareeha turned to look at her.

(When Mercy looked at humans, she could see all of them, all their parts. When she looked at Fareeha, she saw so much more. She couldn’t explain it, but somehow she was more, more than the simple sum of parts that she saw everyone else as. Mercy wanted her, in a way she had never wanted anyone. It was troubling, in a way.)

“…Will it hurt?” She asked finally.

Mercy’s smile returned.

Losing your soul didn’t feel like much. Just a sudden hollowness in your chest, where you weren’t aware something had been before. An emptiness in a place in your body you didn’t know existed – and then coldness.

Mercy knew that feeling well, and now, so did Fareeha.


End file.
